Ancient Treasures

by Brian Haughton

  Realizing that Schliemann could provide the financial backing he needed, Calvert convinced him that Hisarlik was indeed the site of Homer’s Troy and gave the businessman a detailed description of his excavations there. Soon afterward Schliemann applied for a firman (permit or license) from the Turkish government to excavate the whole mound of Hisarlik. Schliemann believed that Troy would have been the first city built on the site, and therefore at the bottom of the great mound. Realizing the amount of work to be done and impatient to begin, Schliemann started his excavations in 1870, before the firman arrived. It soon became obvious that he and Calvert had decidedly different approaches to archaeological excavation—Calvert slow and methodical, Schliemann rushed and haphazard. The longed-for firman finally arrived in August 1871, and Schliemann began official excavations with 70 or 80 workmen on October 11th and dug until November 24th. One of the terms stated in the firman was that any treasure found must be divided with the government; another declared that all walls discovered must be left in place. As we shall see, Schliemann was to ignore both of these stipulations.

  All Schliemann’s excavation work was concentrated on the western part of the mound—that which belonged to the Turkish government rather than Calvert, and although he managed to reach a depth of 13 feet, destroying great blocks of stone wall and various levels of archaeological history in the process, he could identify nothing Homeric. But Schliemann was not a man to be so easily disheartened. During excavations on Calvert’s part of Hisarlik in June 1872, Schliemann and Calvert discovered an architectural sculpture showing the sun god Helios riding the four horses of the sun, dating from the early Hellenistic period (c 300 BC–c 280 BC) and therefore much later than the time of Homer. Schliemann paid Calvert $200 for the sculpture, a fraction of its real worth, and later it and various other artifacts from the dig were smuggled out of the country and ended up decorating the garden of Schliemann’s house in Athens.

  Finally, in August 1872, Schliemann’s team discovered the skeleton of a woman that showed signs of burning, accompanied by gold earrings, silver armbands, and a dress pin. The woman, Schliemann decided, must have died during the sack of Troy by the Greeks. This discovery gave Schliemann renewed hope for his third digging campaign, which began in February 1873, and in May of that year he uncovered a gate and a portion of the defensive walls of a settlement. Schliemann pronounced that this must be the famous Scaean Gate, the celebrated entrance-way to Priam’s Troy and where, according to Homer, Paris had killed Achilles with a single arrow. Ever the self-publicist, Schliemann kept the public informed of his archaeological discoveries through his dispatches to the London Times and the Daily Telegraph, as well as a number of other newspapers; consequently he felt that the pressure was on him to back up his theories with hard evidence in the form of spectacular finds.

  On or around May 31, 1873, the day before the season’s digging finished, Schliemann and his workmen were excavating near the walls of what he believed was Priam’s Troy. Suddenly they came upon a large copper vessel, and Schliemann’s eager eye spotted a glint of gold inside it. In order that he could (according to his diary) “withdraw the treasure from the greed of my workmen, and to save it for archaeology,”1 Schliemann called lunch break, during which time he cut the treasure out of the ground with a large knife and with the help of his wife, Sophia, who carried objects in her shawl, took the treasure off site. Schliemann then had the collection taken to Frederick Calvert’s farm at Akca Koy, about 4 miles south of Hisarlik. The problem with this account of the famous discovery, as Schliemann later admitted, was that at the time it was made, Sophia was in Athens with her family, after the death of her father. In the following week Schliemann had the treasure packed up in chests and smuggled out of the country by ship to Greece, without a word to the Turkish authorities. All this was done without Schliemann having recorded details about the exact level and find spots of the valuable artifacts he had discovered, which of course led to doubts about whether the objects had all been found in the same part of the site or at the same level.

  Nevertheless, in August 1873, when Schliemann published his discovery of “Priam’s Treasure” at Troy it caused a sensation. The fabulous riches he had uncovered included an incredible collection of gold and silver diadems (two particularly striking gold diadems had attached gold pendants), bracelets, earrings, pendants, rings, plates, vases, goblets, knife blades, buttons, cups, and perfume jars, as well as ceremonial stone axes, copper lance heads, daggers, and axes. The treasure was huge; the gold rings and buttons alone accounted for 8,750 items. But what did this incredibly rich collection of objects represent? Was it a sacrifice to the gods at some particularly hazardous time in Troy’s history? Or could this event have been Homer’s Trojan War?

  Unfortunately for him, Schliemann’s publication of his incredible finds also attracted the unwanted attention of the Turkish authorities, who, understandably enraged that the objects had been smuggled out of their country, withdrew their permission for Schliemann to excavate and sued him for a share of the treasure. After much negotiation the Turks eventually won a $5,000 judgment. In the meantime Schliemann turned his attention to Greece and, in August 1876, began excavating at the Bronze Age site of Mycenae, in the northeastern Peloponnese, alongside the Greek Archaeological Society. Again following Homer, and also Pausanias, the second-century AD Roman traveler, Schliemann was looking for royal tombs, perhaps even that of Homeric Greek King Agamemnon himself. The German’s luck proved not to have deserted him, and by November his excavation within the city walls had revealed Shaft Graves (Tombs) containing the skeletons of several Mycenaean chieftains, five of whom were wearing gold face masks, and a host of other rich burial goods. Eventually these spectacular finds were shown to be at least 300 years earlier than the supposed date of the Trojan War (believed by scholars to have been some time in the 12th century BC), and the authenticity of one of the finds, known as the Mask of Agamemnon, has been called into question.

  Encouraged by his findings at Mycenae, Schliemann now wanted to go back to excavate at Troy. In order to facilitate this he paid the Turkish government back $25,000 for the previous finds he had removed from the country and was granted a firman to excavate beginning in 1878. This time, however, Schliemann’s excavations would be closely monitored by the authorities. In August of the same year, some of the objects Schliemann had excavated at Hisarlik were sent to London to be exhibited at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), the last time the treasure would be seen in public for more than a 100 years.

  Schliemann excavated at Hisarlik in three separate seasons, from 1878 to 1879, from 1882 to 1883, and finally from 1888 to 1890. In 1881, accompanied by Sophia, he traveled to Berlin, where he ceremoniously handed over Priam’s Treasure to the German people. The exquisite collection was afterward divided between two adjacent Berlin museums, the Museum of Applied Arts and Design (inside the Martin Gropius building) and the Ethnographical Museum (later renamed the Museum of Early and Pre-History), where a room was dedicated to Schliemann’s finds. Various other items from Schliemann’s later digs at Hisarlik were also subsequently donated to Berlin museums.

  The final series of excavations at Hisarlik, from 1888 to 1890, were undertaken alongside German architect and archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853–1940), a pioneer of the method of dating archaeological sites based on the strata in which objects are found. Dörpfeld was to teach Schliemann much about careful archaeological excavation, and it was he who continued excavations at Hisarlik after Schliemann died in Naples in December 1890, a few days after visiting Pompeii. Schliemann’s funeral in Athens was an elaborate affair attended by the king of Greece, various government ministers, and the cream of Athenian society. He was buried in a luxurious mausoleum at the First Cemetery in Athens, practically a temple to his achievements, decorated with scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and a portrait of him excavating at Troy holding a copy of Homer. Frank Calvert, meanwhile, died at his farm on August 12, 1908
, and was buried in the small family cemetery at Çanakkale in the Dardanelles.

  Along with later excavators of Troy Carl Blegen and Dr. Manfred Osman Korfmann, Dörpfeld’s work revealed that there were at least nine cities built one on top of each other at the site. Furthermore, the city Schliemann had believed was Homer’s Troy (known as Troy II) was later revealed to have been much too old, dating from around 2600 BC to 2250 BC. The general consensus among archaeologists now is that Troy VIIa (c mid-13th century BC–1190 BC) is the most likely candidate for Homer’s Troy. Despite these archaeological facts, Priam’s Treasure and the archaeological remains Schliemann discovered at Hisarlik are still associated with Homer’s Troy in the public mind.

  But what of the treasure itself?

  In 1902 German scholar Hubert Schmidt cataloged the pieces from Schliemann’s excavations at Hisarlik, at that time numbering 9,704 pieces, and divided them into no less than 19 separate “treasure” hoards, identified by the letters A through S. Schmidt designated “Priam’s Treasure” itself (defined as the objects discovered at the end of May 1873) as “Treasure A.”

  For a long time it was believed that Priam’s Treasure had been destroyed during the Battle of Berlin, fought between April and May 1945, and the last major offensive of WWII. During the battle the Red Army defeated the German forces, and the fall of the city would lead to the surrender of the Germans and the end of WWII. But as it turned out, Schliemann’s luck had continued even long after his death. Before the beginning of WWII, Hitler had ordered that all works of art held in Berlin should be classified into three categories: Class 1 (Irreplaceable; usually gold and precious metal/stones objects), Class 2 (Very Valuable; usually silver objects), or Class 3 (Other). The objects in Schliemann’s Treasure fell into all three categories and were thus separated into three Class 1 crates (the most valuable gold objects were packed in a crate numbered MVF 1), 30 Class 2 crates, and a number of Class 3 crates. In August 1939, just a week before the German invasion of Poland, the museum in the Gropius Building was closed and the crates were moved to the basement for safekeeping. Allied bombs began dropping on the city in August 1940, and in January 1941 the crates were moved again, some of them to the Prussian Maritime Commercial bank and others to the cellar of the New Mint, part of the Reichsbank building. In September and November, the crates were transferred to a bunker beneath the Zoo flak tower, a gigantic anti-aircraft defense tower in the Tiergarten district, next to the Berlin Zoological Garden.

  However, during the chaos of the Battle of Berlin in April-May 1945, the crates containing Priam’s Treasure and other valuables were located by members of the Red Army, and left Berlin by air on June 30th, heading for Russia. Crate MVF 1 containing the gold objects was flown to Moscow; the silver objects were sent to St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad). That was the last anyone heard of Priam’s Treasure. During the succeeding Cold War years Russia repeatedly denied any knowledge of what had happened to the collection, and all hope seemed lost that Schliemann and Calvert’s discoveries from Troy would ever be seen again.

  Then, in August 1993, the Russian government made a startling announcement. It reported from Moscow that it had been storing Priam’s Treasure in the basement of the Pushkin Museum since the end of the war, and that it was about to put the objects on display. It took a while, but on April 6, 1996, “The Treasures of Troy from the Collection of Heinrich Schliemann” was exhibited at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. But was this all of Schliemann’s treasure? There were 260 individually cataloged items in the exhibit, but some items are obviously made up of many smaller pieces, such as necklaces, some of which contain as many as 200 individual beads. Consequently scholars have estimated that there are around 12,000 single pieces (representing 13 of the original 19 treasures) in the collection at the Pushkin Museum. Included in the collection is of course Treasure A (Priam’s Treasure), which once consisted of 183 objects, 101 of which are held in the Pushkin Museum. The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has 414 inventoried bronze items from Troy, including spearheads, knives, chisels, pins, toggle-pins, needles, sickles, hammer-axes, and flat axes, and also 55 clay pots. Other items from the caches of artifacts from Troy are believed to be scattered among various museums and private collectors around the world.

  The 1996 exhibit had another, perhaps unexpected, effect. Once it became known that Priam’s Treasure had been in Russia all along, the German government made a claim on the items. The Russian government, however, replied as it has done to all German claims on what it calls “trophy art” (looted German art): that such art treasures taken at the end of WWII are appropriate compensation for damage done to its country during the conflict (see the chapter on the Amber Room for more on this issue). Since then, years of negotiations between Germany and Russia for the return of Priam’s Treasure (and many other stolen works of art) to Berlin have taken place without a mutually acceptable solution having been reached. Turkey, too, has made claims on Schliemann’s treasure, naturally enough (as Troy is in Turkey). Another claim, at least on part of the treasure, came not from a country but from a family.

  In 1996 it was announced that British and American heirs of Frank Calvert were filing a claim for a part of Schliemann’s treasure discovered on Calvert’s land. Working from Schliemann’s notebooks British archaeologist and member of Manfred Korfmann’s excavation team at Troy, Dr. Donald F. Easton, has discovered that Treasure L from Hisarlik, a particularly rich hoard of ceremonial axes and various rock crystal objects discovered in 1890, was located in Calvert’s part of the mound. Although Calvert’s heirs would appear to have had a legitimate claim, the treasure still remains at the Pushkin Museum. Perhaps the best suggestion was made by Dr. Easton in 1995 in the journal Antiquity that there should be “an internationally-sponsored museum” erected at the site of Troy “where Trojan material from collections in all countries can be gathered on permanent loan.”2

  Throughout the years another point of contention regarding Priam’s Treasure has been its genuineness. For years after Schliemann’s discoveries were made public there were rumors that he had in fact hired a jeweler to manufacture “ancient” jewelry that he then distributed throughout the site. However, there has never been any evidence produced to support this theory. Indeed a number of academics, including Dr. Manfred Korfman and Dr. Donald Easton, closely examined a number of items from Priam’s Treasure in Moscow in 1994 and found them to be genuine.

  But perhaps the most controversial claims surrounding the authenticity of Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy are those made by Dr. David A. Traill, a classics professor at the University of California. The most pointed of Traill’s allegations (summed up in his 1997 book, Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit), is that Schliemann’s own accounts of his discovery of Priam’s Treasure (Treasure A) outside the city gates of Troy are not to be trusted (Traill calls him a “pathological liar”3) and it is more likely that the cache was in fact a collection of artifacts discovered at several places throughout the site on separate excavations between 1871 and 1873. Traill even goes as far as to suggest that Schliemann’s finds were “augmented by purchases”4 probably from local villagers or from dealers in Athens or Constantinople.

  However, a number of archaeologists, including Donald F. Easton, have come to Schliemann’s defense, saying that, though it is essential to be careful and critically minded when assessing Schliemann’s work, his mistakes were more the result of eagerness and haste rather than outright deceit. Most archaeologists concur with Traill on one point, however: that there are grounds for believing that Schliemann’s account of discovering Priam’s Treasure in one place in July 1873 is not true, and that this hoard is probably an assemblage of artifacts from various parts of the site rather than a single collection. Although this is indeed a worrying fact, it should not detract from the importance of Schliemann’s achievements at Troy and their lasting significance. Schliemann stated in his diaries, “If my memoirs…contain contradictions, I hope that these may
be pardoned when it is considered that I have revealed a new world of archaeology.”5 No one can argue that with his excavations at Troy and his discoveries of thousands of fascinating artifacts, including Priam’s Treasure, Schliemann did indeed reveal “a new world of archaeology.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Lydian Hoard (The Karun Treasure)

  The Lydian Hoard is a priceless collection of 363 gold and silver artifacts dating to the sixth century BC and originating from tombs in ancient Lydia (modern western Turkey). Most of the collection was looted from the grave of a Lydian princess in the 1960s and sold on to a local antiquities dealer before finding its way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City by 1970. In 1986 a formal demand for return of the treasure was made by Turkey, but the request was rejected. In 1987 Turkey entered into what were to become drawn-out legal proceedings against the Met for the return of the Lydian Treasure, the case eventually being settled out of court in 1993. With whispers of a fatal curse being connected to the treasure, one or two people were not surprised when news broke in 2006 that one of the central pieces from the treasure on display in U§ak Museum in Turkey was, in fact, a fake, the original having been stolen about a year earlier. The former director of the Museum was the prime suspect in the case.

  The Lydian Treasure is also known as the Karun Treasure after an extremely wealthy man in the Koran, and is sometimes also given the title the Treasures of Croesus, after the Lydian King Croesus. Croesus was ruler of Lydia from 560 BC to 547 BC and was renowned for his prodigious wealth (hence the expression “as rich as Croesus”). However, although the artifacts from the Lydian Hoard are contemporary with the reign of Croesus, there is no evidence that they are directly associated with him.